Plans to stage a Wagner concert at Tel Aviv University, in apparent flouting of Israel’s unofficial ban of the notoriously anti-Semitic composer’s work, has been roundly criticised by Holocaust survivors.
The move comes after the generally accepted ban, which is not legally enforced, was first broken last year, the first such occasion since 1938, when the Israel Chamber Orchestra (ICO) played his music at a festival in his honour in Germany.
Umbrella group The Centre of Organisations of Holocaust Survivors (COHS) in Israel has slammed the university’s decision to break with the taboo in a planned concert for June 18, describing it as an “abuse of the feelings of the survivors and the wider Israel community”.
The ICO made the controversial move to perform Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll opera at the renowned Beyreuth Opera Festival last July. It was the first time an Israeli orchestra has played Wagner in Germany, the controversial composer’s birthplace.
Defending the decision at the time, conductor Roberto Paternostro, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors, accepted that “Wagner’s ideology and anti-Semitism were terrible, but he was a great composer”, arguing that his music should be considered in a separate light to his widely condemned politics.
The orchestra’s chief executive similarly backed the move to play at a festival also including the works of such Jewish composers as Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn. Wagner is known for having described Jewish composers as “comparable to worms feeding on the body of art”.
Wagner has long been synonymous with Nazi German, despite dying 50 years before the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany. Hitler himself claimed “Richard Wagner is my religion”. The empathy between Wagner and the Nazis was largely the result of a controversial essay he wrote in 1851, entitle “Judaism in Music”, in which he condemned “cursed Jewish scum”, describing them as “hostile to European civilisation” and “ruling the world through money”.
He is also said to have coined the terms “Jewish problem” and “final solution”, which later became known as the Nazi plan for the total deportation and extermination of the European Jewish population.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants accused the ICO of perpetrating “a disgraceful abandonment of solidarity with those who suffered unspeakable horrors by the purveyors of Wagner’s banner”.
Tel Aviv University responded to the latest controversy by claiming the auditorium staging the concert is reserved for private events, the nature of which are not determined by them.
In a letter of protest to university president Joseph Klafter, however, COHS vice chairman Uri Hanoch asserted the university had “a right and duty to prevent public harm to the feelings of Holocaust survivors”.